DamNation’s production team was likely spot on when guessing who would go to a screen- ing of their movie: outdoorsmen, the already environmentally conscious, and a generation of fledgling activists. Environmental documentarians Ben Knight and Travis Rummel have created a movie that affirms many of this audience’s biases. But regardless, it’s undeniable that DamNation calls for careful reflection on the environmental and economic implications of America’s dams.

At first glance, DamNation looks like a conventional environmental documentary. This Patagonia-produced film’s footage often feels like it could have been pulled from one of the outdoor retailer’s commercials, with stunning images of verdant landscapes and herculean dams that would blow anyone away. But DamNation is not filled with the kind of fire and brimstone rhetoric that have become little more than white noise in our country. Instead, viewers are exposed to the many implications of dams in a manner that feels grounded in the imperative to take feasible actions while we still can. Interviews with concerned ecologists and harrowing scenes of dam-flooded valleys, though disconcerting, are punctuated by the explosive and oddly cathartic footage of dams being destroyed across the country, flares of salmon-saving, rubble-filled hope.

The characters—a heartbreaking elder of the Elwha Tribe, a dam graffiti artist with an impish grin, and a hydropower employee who fears the loss of his job, among others—add a distinctly human element to a topic that could so easily be lost in numbers. The arguable star of the documentary has to be 94-year-old Katie Lee, an adorable, wonderfully lewd woman that everyone who sees this movie inexorably considers adopting. Her entertaining recollections of her expeditions in Glen Canyon offer an especially poignant window into pre-dam times. The energy that pulses throughout DamNationimpels viewers not only to reflect on this lost world, but to strive to resurrect it.